It’s Saturday! Woohoo! That’s what my inner 17 year old sounds like – full of good intentions and great expectations for the day. Of course after getting up, feeding the dogs and tortoise, changing everyone’s water, making coffee, going to the dump, picking up groceries, sitting in “plant expo” traffic on Main Street, putting groceries away, making lunch, letting the dogs out to burn off some energy, dragging the week’s laundry to the basement (but not yet starting it), dragging the vacuum up from the basement (but not yet using it), and finally sitting down to blog, I’m not entirely sure Saturday is “Woohoo!” worthy. As far as I can tell its only redeeming quality so far is that it’s not a work day. While that’s quite an achievement, I’m think we can do better. Yeah, this would be the part where my inner 70 year old takes over and is pretty much annoyed by everything… especially the reality sets in that I work harder on Saturday than I do any other day of the week and for way less pay.
Tag Archives: weekend
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
1. Big Brother Knows Best. His distinguished honor the Mayor of New York City said earlier this week that “…our obligation first and foremost is to keep our kids safe in the schools; first and foremost, to keep you safe if you go to a sporting event; first and foremost is to keep you safe if you walk down the streets or go into our parks.” He went on to say “We cannot let the terrorists put us in a situation where we can’t do those things. And the ways to do that is to provide what we think is an appropriate level of protection.” Public safety is a key critical function of government, I agree, but we shouldn’t buy it at the expense of our other liberties. Whether they’re lost to a terrorist’s bomb to to the government trying to stop the terrorists, once those rights are gone, they’re never, ever coming back. If we let cowards change the way we live or lives, if we let government tell us how much privacy we should have or how much of other essential freedoms we need to have or how much we should be willing to surrender, well, I’m not sure I know what we’re fighting for anyway.
2. Moving the Goal Posts. I’m a tiny cog in a vast machine. As such, I’m cognizant that I have almost no control over my own schedule and even less influence over setting the agenda… but honest to God, I’ve had the same meeting scheduled and cancelled three times over the course of two days. Priorities shift, sometimes on short notice. That’s fine. I’m all for improvising, adapting, and overcoming. The hurry up and wait mentality is as old as the institution I serve – far older really. I have a suspicion that the Greek and Roman bureaucracies were not strangers to WTF moments. Expecting a schedule that everyone can agree to and stick with is a pipe dream… but that doesn’t make the constant moving goal posts any less obnoxious.
3. Thursday. Screw you, Thursday. You use to be cool. You use to be thirsty. You use to have dime drafts. Now you’re just as much a crank as any of the other weekdays – just another work-a-day trudging towards the weekend. Not even your neighbor Friday is good for much of anything these days. He’s in a pissy mood until the middle of the afternoon, so I don’t really have much use for him either. The only thing that makes either one of your tolerable is that the path to Saturday runs right through you. That’s the only reason you’re not dead to me.
The trouble with being a vegetable…
After the better part of 12 hours of not doing much more than was absolutely necessary to sustain life, the only thing I can really say is that being a vegetable isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be… mostly because it’s 4PM, there’s no laundry done, dinner isn’t started, the floors haven’t been swept, and the whole house has a vague tinge of “disaster area.” We’re going to continue to ignore the odds and ends outside that still need tended for the time being. As it turns out, I’m apparently not a vegetable kind of guy. I’m not a run out and sign up for a triathalon guy either, but sitting around doing nothing clearly isn’t my speed. Apparently I just need a handy day-long reminder of that from time to time.
So, the rest of the weekend is going to be about triage… prioritizing those things that actually need to get done and doing them, while putting off whatever random tasks and odd jobs fall somewhere into the nice to do category. As you can see, blogging was clearly job one on the “must do” list for today. Once that’s settled, it’s on to the “start dinner” task – also highly rated in the must do category. Once that’s settled, the priority of the remaining items falls off sharply. If I had to take a wild guess, the rest of the day will involve some combination of reading and writing. Come to think of it, this day would have been greatly improved if I’d have lead off with those and eased into some of the other stuff. Now I know. And that’s half the battle or so I’ve been told.
Over the horizon…
Some days you just have nothing to show for getting out of bed. As far as I can tell, this is one of those days. For the record, that’s not a complaint. It’s a simple acknowledgment of fact. It’s one of those days where the best thing you can say is that you’ve managed to do no harm – neither advancing the cause or making it substantively worse in any way. It’s a draw… and if you’re a smart bureaucrat, you’ve survived long enough to know that a draw is effectively a win, because the scales are almost always weighted in the direction of making things worse off than they were before you touched something.
I should really put a more positive spin on the day. To paraphrase what a wise man told me this morning, “Look on the bright side, it’s Tuesday. That means were as far away from next Monday as it’s possible to get.” It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic. After all, it’s Tuesday night now. If you strain your eyes hard enough you can start to see the first signs of the weekend coming on, even though it’s still out there somewhere over the horizon. That’s as cup-half-full as I’m likely to get, so make of it what you will.
And people say I never post anything positive. This’ll show ‘em.
Consider yourself pestered…
So the experts on how to do thing online seem to all be telling me that I should be pestering you at least once a day about buying a copy of the book. Cajoling your friends into giving you $2 at every opportunity strikes me as a little unseemly, though. I’ll try to limit the direct self promotion, at least here in the blog, to no more than once a week. With that being said, please consider yourself pestered about the high quality book that I have available for sale from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. With that out of the way, we can get on to other topics and all feel better about ourselves.
With that, we’ve reached the point in the weekend where I find I have nothing really to discuss. Saturday is, as it often is with me, a function of routine. Trash went to the dump, I filled up the gas tank, I wanted to burn Walmart to the ground, and I looked around outside and realized that I’m going to have to start cutting grass sooner rather than later. Dull by most standards, I’m sure. I’ll get some laundry done, hopefully find enough muse to write a blog post and a few hundred words on another project. Again, nothing earth shaking. It’s been my experience that earth shaking isn’t everything is made up to be. Give me quiet, calm, and predictable any day of the week.
Spoke too soon…
Last Saturday I commented on the more or less mundane weekend routine I like to slip into. As usual, life has conspired to turn me into a liar at the first available opportunity. Someone (I’m looking at you, Cait) bet me a chicken dinner that I couldn’t stay awake until midnight… which was summarily changed to 1:30 when I showed signs of getting it done. I might have seen the clock roll past 3AM before finally dropping off. It was a matter of principle, after all. Sadly, my internal clock doesn’t stand on principle so I was still wide awake at 7:30. That’s fine. I mean who needs more than four hours of sleep anyway?
Fortunately, I managed to find the coffee without too much trouble and even got a roast in the crock pot (yeah, I don’t know when I’m going to get my chicken dinner prize). Winston decided it was a good morning to eat a bottle of hand sanitizer, so I’m keeping an eye on him, too. And the person who instigated this chain of events is still asleep. Somehow I thing I’m getting the short end of the bet-you-can’t-say-awake deal. It’s decidedly not a routine Saturday.
If anyone needs me, there’s a good chance I’ll be right here – asleep at the keyboard.
That’s what I call a Saturday…
So yeah, the dogs are fed, the tortoise is fed, the laundry is mostly done, I managed to both write and edit a bit today, dinner is cooking away without any additional need for my attention, and Fox News is yammering away in the background. That’s what I call a Saturday. And I’m not sure if it’s impressive, depressive, or some combination of the two. If anyone needs me, I’ll pe selecting a something to watch for this weekend’s edition of Dinner and a Movie.
Dead space…
I feel about federal holidays like some women seem to feel about shoes; I love them and can never, never get enough. As much as I love President’s Day for being one of the days I can sit back with my feet up and enjoy not doing a damned thing. Nothing in life is free, of course, and that means taking the bad with the good. In this case, the bad is that President’s Day is the last holiday between now and the end of May. Call me crazy but the months just seem to go better when you have a impending long weekend to look forward to every few weeks. Having one 90-odd days off into the future doesn’t have the same motivational effect. No one has ever accused me of being a big fan of delayed gratification.
Sure, be happy you have a job, not everyone even gets federal holidays, blah, blah, blah. All of those things may be true, but the only thing I see stretching out in front of me between here and May 27th is dead space. Well, dead space and as-yet-unscheduled days of annual leave, but mostly dead space. And please, don’t get me started on how it’s possible that it’s the middle of February already. I’m pretty sure time has been set to march past at the double quick. First world problems, to be sure, but since I live in the first world, I just think of them as the regular kind of problems.
Time of day…
I love this time of day – The few hours before the rest of the world wakes up, finds the caffeine, and starts moving again. The hours when it’s quiet, when the dogs, still groggy, are happy to nap at my feet, and George is satisfied with basking on his rock under his own miniature sun. It’s a few brief moments of time that seem to work well before the day has a chance to jerk things around too much. Anyway, my only point is that I really do enjoy these weekend mornings. Of course I enjoy the weekday mornings too, but since they’re so quickly interrupted by pulling into the parking lot and putting on my “professional” face, they don’t really get to count.
It’s President’s Day weekend. That doesn’t mean much unless you work for Uncle Sam or a bank, but for me, it means the last scheduled three day weekend between now and the end of May. As tragic as that is, for the first time in a long time, I think I’m making every minute of it count. Starting it off with plenty of coffee, a little bit of writing, and a big dopey grin seems to be like a good place to start. Yeah. I love this time of day.
Making empties…
I wish I had one of those USB port in the back of your head kind if get ups that Neo had in The Matrix. If I did, I’m pretty sure the first thing I’d do is download some semblance of patience. I’ve already spent too much time here talking about basically having none of it to speak of so this won’t be a long rant. It’s not like I’m asking for infinite patience, just a little. Enough to keep me from cleaning out the fridge while I’m waiting for the weekend to start. Then again maybe the best thing to do is turn a few of those full bottles into empties and actually try to relax.
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